by Ray Winstone
They’d taken me to Christ Church, Spitalfields, the big white church opposite the market my dad used to take me to as a kid when he was in the fruit and veg game. I didn’t remember ever having been inside before – me and my family not being churchy kind of people, and in any case it was boarded up and virtually derelict for most of the sixties and seventies – but it looks amazing now it’s all been restored. So I’m standing there in this beautiful place, waiting for the bad news about Hannah getting gruesomely done in by the Ripper, and then they tell me that it was in this church that she married her second husband.
It turned out that Stratton wasn’t actually my great-great-grandfather at all, because Hannah managed to marry again within a year of his death. She would probably have been ostracised at first because of the syphilis, and could easily have headed for the nearest gin palace and ended up in the gutter somewhere, but instead she thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m fighting for my kids.’ So she stood her ground and her neighbours rallied round to help her – which was incredible in itself, because that kind of thing doesn’t happen so much today, at least not in cities, where no one tends to know who the people living next door to them are any more.
After Hannah remarried and became Mrs Durham, she and her new husband lived round the corner from Christ Church – for a while, and then moved to West Hackney. Her syphilis became dormant and she had more kids, so that was when my granddad’s father was born. Her second husband had only been twenty-seven when they married – effectively a toyboy, and she never marked his card about exactly how old she was. So, while he thought she eventually died at the ripe old age of sixty-one, it was probably a good bit riper than that.
You couldn’t blame her for dangling the carrot a bit, though, given that she had kids to look after. And if she hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t be here today, so it was a happy ending for me as well. (And for the programme-makers, because Hannah’s story did make me cry. It broke my heart, to be honest, but it also made me very proud of her, and glad I’d done the show as now I can pass the story on down through my family to make sure she’s not forgotten.)
All in all, Hannah Durham was an amazing old girl, and I could see a lot of the characteristics of my sister Laura and my auntie Irene, my dad’s sister, in her. Not that either of them have ever had syphilis, but I’ve got a lot of strong women in my family. Obviously my mum’s is a different line, but it’s the same on her side as well. We’ll get to my maternal grandma and her three husbands in the next chapter . . .
In the meantime, the long and the short of it is that the men in my family seem to like marrying strong women, probably because we need them to keep us in line. But the other thing I realised standing in that old Hawksmoor church – and I know this might sound overly romantic, a bit pony even – was the depth of my family’s connection to the area.
My dad was born in Hoxton. You could definitely hear the bells of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside from there, so that makes him a proper cockney. And as I’ve said, the family had been basically there or thereabouts since the 1700s, until his generation started to move away in the late sixties. Yet now, just a few decades later, I’ve got cousins in Dunmow, Braintree, Watford, Bushey, but there’s none of us left inside the M25: we’ve all got let out for good behaviour. How and why that change came about, and what it meant to us and to others, is one of the main subjects of this book.
I still think of myself as an East Londoner rather than a Londoner. And as I was driving in to do that filming in Spitalfields from where I live now, out in Essex, I seemed to pass places that had some relevance to mine or my family’s lives every few hundred yards from Whipps Cross onwards. None of the actual people are there any more, but that doesn’t make the memories any less vivid. It might even bring them through more strongly – after all, you don’t need to remember things that are still happening.
We were a big old tribe, and when I was a kid we used to have a big get-together more or less every Sunday, but now we’re much more dispersed, and the unit has kind of contracted much more to immediate family. My cousins all keep in touch, but I’ve been guilty of letting that go a bit in recent years. The way people perceive you is part of it as well. You start living in a bigger house and they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, we went past yours the other day’, so you’ll say, ‘Well, why didn’t you fucking knock on the door?’ But if the door’s behind a security gate, then the fact that they don’t knock on it is as much your fault as anyone else’s, isn’t it?
Looking back now, I can clearly see the staging posts by which the old closeness started to leave us. When my mum and dad brought me back from Hackney Hospital in the winter of 1957 (the building’s still there, up on Homerton High Street – I think it was the tall Victorian-looking wing to the east, not the lower section where the entrance is – but last time I looked they’d turned it into a nuthouse in my honour), they didn’t have a home of their own yet. From what I’ve gathered, there was never any question but that the three of us would stay in the flat in Shore Place with my dad’s parents for a little while after my birth.
At a time when families would generally stay in the same place, nans and granddads were the nucleus of everything – everyone else would circulate around them. Now they just tend to get left where they are when everyone moves away, and then you see ’em when you can. It’s no wonder they get a bit grumpy. I feel lucky to have grown up at the tail-end of the old way of doing things, because the world of my childhood could not have wished for a better focus than my granddad Charles – Toffy they called him, I suppose because he was a bit of a toff – and Nanny Maud.
He was a real one-off, my grandfather; an old-fashioned gentleman. I’m sure a lot of people say that about their grandparents, but in this case it was definitely true. Toffy was a short, wiry man who always dressed immaculately and never forgot to lift his hat to the ladies as he walked down the road. By all accounts – at least, all accounts of his own – he was the man behind the modernisation of tic-tacking (the complex sign language for communicating bookmakers’ odds which you used to see John McCririck doing on the telly, until Channel 4 Racing gave him the Spanish – as in Spanish Archer, the El Bow). I think he definitely simplified it, him and another fella . . . there’s always another fella.
Nanny Maud was a similarly upright individual. I think she’d run a café as a younger woman, but by the time I came along everyone called her ‘The Schoolteacher’, because she had a lovely proper way of talking. She wasn’t all gorblimey, she was much more ‘telephone voice’. Even nowadays, when you meet the really old East London boys and girls, I find they have that almost Dickensian style of speaking which is nothing like how I sound. There’s still an accent, but it’s all very clipped and correct, and it’s a beautiful thing to hear.
I don’t have any specific recollections of sharing a home with Toffy and Maud as a child, because we moved out of there when I was about a year old. But some of my happiest early childhood memories are of the days when Maud would take me to the toy shop in Mile End – just by the junction where they’ve put that silly grass roof over the main road – and buy me Airfix kits, or the Batmobile with a Bat-boat that fired little rockets out the back. And in my teens I’d actually end up living with my granddad for a year, which would turn out to be one of the most influential, as well as the funniest, times in my life.
Hospitals take away as well as giving, and in my early teens Nanny Maud would die in the same place I’d been born. She had a fall and never quite got over it, and I don’t think the family could ever forgive Hackney Hospital for the feeling that a bit more could’ve been done. I was a kid on the cusp of being a young man by that stage, and I remember the sombre, grown-up mood of the family gathering in the Jackdaw & Stump – the pub just along the high street from the hospital – when everyone had come up to visit Nan together after her fall.
We were all worried about her, and at times like that you obviously feel an atmosphere of foreboding in the air, but I don’t think any of us realised how bi
g a change was coming. People often think of the granddad as being the head of a family, but I think it’s the nan, really. Obviously once she’s gone, you still go and see him – and Toffy did a pretty good job of managing by himself, he even got himself a nice girlfriend after a while – but you can see how lost the men in the family are once the maternal mainstay is gone. From then on, there’s less and less reason for everyone to get together, and the whole family starts to break up.
It was probably a good job I didn’t know all that on the day of her funeral, because I was upset enough already. This was the first loss I was old enough to really feel properly. I remember being outside the flats where all the flowers were laid out ready to be taken to the cemetery, when I heard some local kid ask ‘Who’s dead?’ quite rudely and I lost the plot. I couldn’t cope with that at all – it seemed very disrespectful – and things went pear-shaped for a few seconds, before I was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet and have a little bit of dignity about myself.
‘Who’s dead?’ is never the right question to ask, though, is it? If someone says, ‘Who’s passed?’ you can tell they’re making an effort, but ‘Who’s dead?’ is just too brutal. That’s not to say there’s no room for levity when someone’s died. Quite the reverse. I remember it used to be a big event for my dad and his mates – and we still do it today – when someone would say, ‘There’s a bit of underground sports on Thursday.’ What that means is there’s a funeral, and a funeral means a wake, which means a blinding party.
The funny thing about ‘underground sports’ is, it’s OK for us to talk about them, but we’d still reserve the right to take it amiss if someone else did it at the wrong moment. I love that kind of hypocritical cockney morality. That is very much the tradition I was brought up in, like with the old boys off the docks, they’d be telling you some great stories and effing and blinding all the way through (the expression ‘swear like a docker’ doesn’t come from nowhere), but heaven help you if you swore in front of their wife on the bus: ‘’Scuse me. . . ’scuse me. . . oi! ’Scuse me! Not in front of the wife.’ I do understand and respect that way of doing things – it’s kind of my way of doing things too, if I’m honest – but it does have its flaws.
CHAPTER 2
CAISTOR PARK ROAD, PLAISTOW
When I started writing this book the first thing I did was go back to the street I lived on as a kid. I wanted to have a look around to see if people or incidents I’d forgotten would come flooding back to me. What I couldn’t get over was how much smaller everything was than the way I remembered it. Obviously when you’re little you’re down at hedge and gate level, so the world looks massive to you, but there was more to it than that. Going back to Plaistow now, it feels very quiet and suburban, whereas in my childhood there seemed to be people everywhere, and something was always happening.
Of course at that time – in the late fifties – the London docks were still working at full speed and strength. The southern end of our road wasn’t far away from the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks, so a lot of the hustle and bustle of the neighbourhood (not to mention the odd bit of unofficial bounty from shipping crates that had accidentally on purpose fallen open in transit) could be traced back to there.
The docks are long gone now, or at least the idea that anyone would use them for unloading stuff from boats is. But my home from the age of one to the age of eight – 82 Caistor Park Road, Plaistow – is still very much there, looking more or less unchanged over the intervening half century.
It’s a boxy, two-storey house near the end of a terrace. When we first moved in, we lived upstairs while an old lady and her sister kept the ground floor. Then after my sister Laura came along – in February 1959 – the Winstones took over the downstairs as well. There was never a bathroom (I’m assuming they’ve got one now). We had an outside toilet in the small back garden, and a tin bath would come out in the front room when it was time for a scrub-up.
In my early years my mum had to keep me on reins, because as soon as I saw daylight, I’d be off like a greyhound out of the trap (my eldest girl Lois was the same). But from pretty much the moment Laura and I were old enough to walk around unaided, we played outside in the street all day. There were very few cars about in those times, and we still had a milkman with a horse-drawn cart. He’d come round the corner at a set time every morning, and since all the kids knew he was coming we’d have plenty of time to put bricks in the middle of the road so he’d have to go round them like he was doing a slalom, shouting, ‘You little bastards!’ as he went.
At the north end of Caistor Park Road was, and is, the main drag down to Stratford, and beyond that thoroughfare stretches the wide open space of West Ham Park, which is still a lovely bit of grass to have a walk around. Returning to the area now, I can see that the houses at the top of the road tend to be much better finished off, whereas our bit is more of a khazi. Don’t go down my end – it’s a shithole.
I don’t recall it being that way when I was a kid, but then again, in my memories the sun has always got his hat on. Even though my rational mind knows Londoners were still afflicted by deadly pea-souper fogs at that time, all I can remember is clear skies and long days of unbroken sunshine.
In my mind, Plaistow in the early sixties is like one of those adverts filmed in New York where it’s a hot day and someone knocks the top of the fire hydrant off, except done the English way – with a hosepipe. Over the years you do colour your memories in a bit (at least, I have done), but I’m going to try and keep them as toned down and close to reality as possible. Obviously you’re only going to be seeing things from my point of view, because that’s what an autobiography is all about. But I realise there’s at least one other side to a lot of these stories – just ask Matthew McConaughey – and if someone’s given me another perspective, I’m not going to hold back on it.
For instance, I look back on myself as a little boy and I think I was alright, but my aunties always tell me I was a right little fucker. I’ll insist I was a nice kid and they’ll say, ‘No, you were an absolute fucker – always up to something.’
Now that must be true, because it’s not the sort of thing they’re gonna make up, so I have to start thinking about how they might’ve got that idea. I do remember there was a little parade of shops round the corner from our house where I used to sing for the greengrocer and he would give me a banana – well, every showbiz career has got to start somewhere, hasn’t it? I was still in the pram, so I couldn’t have been that old, but one day I sang for him and he didn’t give me one and I told him to fuck off. My mum would laugh telling me that story years later, but she was embarrassed at the time because she very rarely swore, so wherever I’d picked that word up from, it hadn’t been from her. And ‘No, you’ll have no banana’ was my first bad review. There’ve been a few more since . . .
In Plaistow in the fifties and sixties, there used to be a shop on every corner, and the one change to my immediate childhood surroundings which I really couldn’t get my head round when I went back on my fact-finding mission was that the old corner shop is now just a normal house. The shopkeeper’s name was Mr Custard, which was obviously a gift to us as kids. He had a big shock of unruly white hair and looked a bit like Mr Pastry. We used to terrorise him, going in there and shouting ‘Cowardy, cowardy Custard, can’t eat mustard!’ You know what kids are like. I feel quite sorry for him now, as he was probably a nice old boy.
A lot of good people lived on Caistor Park Road. A couple of doors up from us was a girl called Sylvie who lived with her mum – I don’t remember a dad, and there might not have been one. She must have been in her mid-teens and she used to babysit for us and take me up the park. One day, before my sister was born, she was pushing me to the swings in my stroller when a geezer jumped out in front of us and flashed her. I was only a baby, so I don’t seem to have accrued any deep psychological scars, but when my parents told me the story they were still really impressed that she hadn’t just fucked off and left me. S
he was a lovely girl, Sylvie, and it was very sad that a few years later she committed suicide. I always hoped it wasn’t what happened in the park that day that upset her.
Everyone living on Caistor Park Road knew everyone else, and all the stuff you always hear about windows being left open and it being OK to leave a key hanging behind the door was still true. There was even an old girl living on her own over the way who my mum used to cook dinner for. She had no connection with our family, other than that she lived near us. I know this sounds corny, but people looked after people. They really did. Every time you went out of the house in the morning you’d see women doing their steps and their windows. I know that sounds a bit chauvinistic now, but how can it be a bad thing for people to have taken pride in themselves and in their community?
Our home was always spotless, inside and out. My mum made sure everything was in its place and everything was done properly. She’d learnt that from her mother, who was not a woman to be trifled with.
My nan on my mum’s side was called Dolly Richardson, but she was always Nanny Rich to me. We called her Nanny Rich because she was . . . rich. By the time I was born, she owned a fair bit of property in the Plaistow, Manor Park and Forest Gate areas, and I think it was down to her that we ended up living where we did. She was a furrier by trade – not a farrier shoeing horses, a furrier making coats – and she’d done well enough to move out of East London to Shoeburyness, just along the Essex Riviera from Southend, after the war. There are a few fur coats left in the family somewhere, but obviously you can’t wear ’em any more because someone will throw paint over you. I presume there must have been a few quid poking around when Nanny Rich – God rest her soul – eventually went away in the early eighties, but I never saw any of it.